Staff Sgt. Lorell S. Foust - World War II Veteran
In October, 1941, we traveled through Scotland and England to Liverpool. We lived in a castle for about 30 days until our troop ship was ready. I remember one of the men cleaning his gun one evening and he accidentally fired it up through the floor into the bed above. Luckily no one was in the bed at the time.
We boarded ship for Oran and arrived on November 11, 1941. We were part of the British Army at that time. I had never heard an artillery piece fired and they started firing at German planes at midnight. The guns seemed like they were right in our camp. The next several months we advanced across the northern shores of Africa through Algiers to Tunis. It was there we stockpiled ammo, etc. I remember later on that day seeing this ammunition dump on fire about one mile from our camp. We were saying anyone that would go down there was crazy. Then the Company whistle blew and they told us to prepare to go down there and help load the ammo on trucks to get it away from the fire.
I don't remember sailing from Africa, but we arrived at Foggia, Italy on about September 3, 1943. We were now part of the 5th Army American. We crossed Italy to Naples and started north, but the going was slow and the mud deep. So they decided to go to Anzio by water. We had to prepare our trucks for driving off an LST boat. They picked about 10 men from our Company. When we arrived, the Germans were there by air. They strafed our ship, but did very little damage. We drove off into about three feet of water a quarter mile from shore. The engineers were there ahead of us and de-mined the area and marked where we were to drive. We proceeded to a sandy area about one mile inland and set up camp. The first thing to do was dig a hole in case of air raids. We lived in them for six months. These residences grew to ten by ten feet square, had a wooden top with a camouflage net on top of that. We had lights from our Company generator and they were invisible from the air.
Lorell S. Foust